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Caper Sauce (for Boiled Mutton)
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for a joint. pint of melted butter, 3 tablespoonfuls of capers or nasturtiums, 1 tablespoonful of their liquor. AVERAGE COST, 5d.
Chop the capers twice or thrice, and add them, with their liquor, to 1/2 pint of melted butter, made very smoothly with milk; keep stirring well; let the sauce just simmer, and serve in a tureen. Pickled nasturtium-pods are fine-flavoured, and by many are eaten in preference to capers.
They make an excellent sauce.
TIME.-2 minutes to simmer.
Caper Sauce, A Substitute for. -INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 1 joint. pint of melted butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of cut parsley, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar. AVERAGE COST, 3d. Boil the parsley slowly to let it become a bad colour; cut, but do not chop it fine.
Add it to 1/2 pint of smoothly-made melted butter, with salt and vinegar in the above proportions. Boil up and serve.
TIME.-2 minutes to simmer. a
Two sauces for boiled mutton: the real thing, and a parsley stand-in for households without a caper jar. Almost everything that can go wrong here goes wrong in the phrase "melted butter".
- "Melted butter" is a flour sauceIn Victorian usage melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce — butter cooked with a little flour and then let down with liquid to a pouring consistency. It is not butter melted in a pan, and plain melted butter will split the moment the caper liquor and vinegar go in.
- The quantities as printedThe ingredient lines say "pint of melted butter" while the method says half a pint; the fraction has dropped out of the list in both recipes. Work from the method. An imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups.
- Made with milkBeeton specifies the melted butter be "made very smoothly with milk" here rather than water or mutton broth. Add the milk in stages off the heat and whisk each addition smooth before the next, or you will be picking out lumps.
- The parsley line is garbledThe parsley line reads oddly -- "Boil the parsley slowly to let it become a bad colour" may be a printer's error for "not to let it become a bad colour", or it may be deliberate, the dulled green being meant to resemble capers. If you want the parsley green, blanch it briefly — a minute in salted water, then drained — and cut rather than chop it fine, as directed.
- Simmer, do not boilTwo minutes at a bare simmer is enough to marry the capers in and no more. A flour-thickened milk sauce held at a rolling boil with vinegar in it will thin and taste of scorched flour.
- Capers and their liquorUse the brine from the jar, not vinegar from the bottle, and chop the capers only two or three times as directed — the point is bursts of sharpness against fatty mutton, not a uniform paste. Salt-packed capers need rinsing and then a little extra vinegar to compensate.
- Pickled nasturtium podsThe green seed pods of Tropaeolum majus, pickled in vinegar, are the classic caper substitute and taste peppery rather than floral. They are rarely found in shops; in practice you pickle your own or use capers.
- YieldAbout 1¼ cups, which serves six to eight alongside a leg or shoulder. Serve it hot in a warmed jug — it thickens noticeably as it cools.
Caper sauce and boiled mutton were an almost fixed pairing in nineteenth-century British cooking, the sharp brine cutting the fat of a large boiled joint the way mint sauce cuts roast lamb. Capers themselves are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub, and were an import; the cheaper alternative was plainly labelled economy: parsley, salt and vinegar for 3d where the real sauce cost 5d. Pickled nasturtium pods, which Beeton rates highly, were the kitchen-garden answer to the same problem, and English gardening and cookery books had been recommending them as a caper substitute since the eighteenth century. The wider context is the Victorian family of "melted butter" sauces, a flour-thickened base into which anything from capers to eggs to shrimps was stirred; the term fell out of use as French terminology took over.